Information is pouring out about the red-flashing warning signals that the Fort Hood killer was a homocidal fanatic. Here’s NPR’s account via Instapundit this morning:

EXPLOSIVE: Ft. Hood suspect reportedly shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’. (Via The BlogProf). On NPR I heard — I can’t find the story on their website yet — that he had given a presentation on the Koran at a professional conference where he claimed that unbelievers should be beheaded, burned, etc. to the discomfiture of the attendees.

UPDATE: Here’s the NPR segment. Key bit:

He gave a Grand Rounds presentation. . . You take turns giving a lecture on, you know, the correct treatment of schizophrenia, the right drugs to prescribe for personality disorder, you know, that sort of thing. But instead of giving an academic paper, he gave a lecture on the Koran, and they said it didn’t seem to be just an informational lecture, but it seemed to be his own beliefs. That’s what a lot of people thought.

He talked about how if you’re a nonbeliever the Koran says you should have your head cut off, you should have oil poured down your throat, you should be set on fire. And I said well couldn’t this just be his educating you? And the psychiatrist said yes, but one of the Muslims in the audience, another psychiatrist, raised his hand and was quite disturbed and he said you know, a lot of us don’t believe these things you’re saying, and that there was no place where Hasan couched it as this is what the Koran teaches but you know I don’t believe it. And people actually talked in the hallway afterwards about ‘is he one of these people that’s going to freak out and shoot people someday?’

Kind of reminds me of that old Saturday Night Live skit on “The Shooting of Buckwheat.” You know: “What was he like?” “Nice guy, quiet, kept to himself.” “Are you surprised he shot Buckwheat?” “Oh, no — it’s all he ever talked about.”

MORE: Reader Dan Friedman writes to note that AP has changed the headline in the “Allahu Akhbar” story — the report is still there, now buried in the middle, but the headline now reads “Neighbor: Fort Hood suspect emptied his apartment.” Soft-pedaling?

STILL MORE: Interestingly, the substance of the NPR segment linked above is the same, but now the words are different, and the segment is in a different order. I transcribed the above while listening online earlier; I don’t know if they’ve substituted a different segment, or what.

MORE STILL: I spoke with a very nice woman named Emily at NPR listener services, who told me that these links aren’t stable until the afternoon, when the final West Coast version is laid down and transcribed. So this is a different live interchange than the one I transcribed earlier, explaining why the substance is the same but the wording is different. She said it may change again before 3 pm Eastern. That’s not very blog friendly! But she explained that they roll the story out in different order across the country because of different time zones. Oh, well. There’s actually some additional news in the new version, which is that Walter Reed has been told not to talk to anyone outside the military, even the FBI.

And more from NPR: “A source tells NPR’s Joseph Shapiro that Hasan was put on probation early in his postgraduate work at the Uniformed Service University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. He was disciplined for proselytizing about his Muslim faith with patients and colleagues, according to the source, who worked with him at the time.” I’ve gotten flak in the past over my praise of NPR, but they do good work, though they’d benefit from more diversity. They’re certainly playing this straighter, and less PC, than a lot of media outlets.

FINALLY: Reader C.J. Burch writes: “You’re right on NPR. I heard them this morning. They’ve been pretty good on this. We shouldn’t spit nails at people because they have a slant. Lord knows, I do. We all do. As long as they get the facts right they’re doing their job. At the end of the day people of good will on the left and the right are going to have to live together. Newsweek and some other places, they’re not doing their job as well. But I’ve already run off at the keyboard about that…”

My friend Daniel Pipes has been asking for appropriate profiling by law enforcement for years, for example in this 2003 piece. For this he has been excoriated by the left for years, for example here. The Bush administration was no better than Obama: political correctness and eagerness to avoid giving offense has suppressed obvious and urgently necessary law-enforcement procedures.

The German-language service of Radio Vatican reports that the Gregorian University in Rome has appointed its first Muslim professor, the Tunisan Koran scholar Adnanee Mokrani. Interviewed is Fr. Felix Koerner, whose book on Islamic reform  I reviewed last year in Asia Times under the title, “Tin-opener theology from Turkey.” Fr. Koerner explains that professors at the Gregorian are supposed to profess the Catholic faith. Nonetheless, the Gregorian wanted a Muslim to teach at the Gregorian on a permanent basis. “We have done that now through a construction of Church law which we call ‘Professore Aggregato’,” Koerner told the Vatican site.

The interviewer responded, “So it took some legal trickery, eh? Isn’t the fact that a Professor of the Gregorian University should profess the Christian faith?”

“You’re exactly right!,” said Fr. Koerner. “Nonetheless we can say that there’s someone in the Collegium who confesses another faith, but who nonetheless has a long-term contract here, and who has the confidence that he can offer proper instruction, who of course doesn’t sit on the governing bodies that determine the future of the Gregorian, but who nonetheless belongs in his own way.”

I’m translating, of course, but Koerner did use the word trotzdem three times in the same sentence.

What about reciprocity?, the interviewer asked. “Is there actually something comparable in majority-Musim countries at Islamically-oriented institutions of learning or universities? You yourself taught in Ankara…”

Koerner (who played something of a key role in gestating the “Ankara School” of Islamic theology) said, “Hm. I have in fact taught for a semester at a state university, but that was doubly indicative of a problem. The first question is, why not theology? And the answer is actually: as long as I lived in Ankara, I was a bit scary (unheimlich) to the theological faculty, who was happy to talk to me: “The priest through whom one can convert [to Catholicism] might be an interpreter or mediator, but neer a teacher. But now the same priest — myself — is happilky invited to come from Rome as a partner in dialogue at the theology faculty at Ankara. As long as I lived in Ankara, I couldn’t do this.”

The Jesuit Church in Ankara actually employed a guard at the door to make sure that prospective Turkish converts were turned away from Mass.

These things always are subject to change, but I’m slated for the opening segment, talking about the Fed and the US dollar.

I’ve already had several complaints about bad taste in this post at the First Thoughts blog. Perhaps it will go down better with this crowd.

My essay “Sacred Music, Sacred Time” in the November issue of First Things stirred up a hornets’ nest at the MusicaSacra Forum. I joined the discussion and the hornets reverted to a discourse that, at the conclusion, was almost amiable. The issue of contention was my passing comment that the Solesmes version of Gregorian chant was a 19th century invention rather than the reconstruction of a medieval original (as it happens, this is the standard and correct musicological view). I did not argue that the Church should not use Solesmes chant if it so chose; the chant revival was part of the “Romantic” effort to recreate a medieval Christendom that never existed in quite that way.

Unlike Joe Black, the Angel of Death in a dreadful 1998 Brad Pitt vehicle, Prof. Bill Black is a real rather than a figurative Grim Reaper, at least where white-collar criminals are concerned. The former bank regulator, now a University of Missouri Professor, was the main narrator of  this week’s Village Voice cover story by James Lieber, entitled:

We’ve Bailed out the Banks. When Do We Go After the Crooks Behind our Financial Collapse?

He’s on the Tech Ticker at Yahoo Finance today complaining about another government throwaway of billions of dollars, this time in the case of CIT.

The government was in no way obligated to lend the struggling CIT money and, in fact, initially refused to provide it bailout funds.  More importantly, being the lender of last resort, the government should have guaranteed we’d be the first to get paid if CIT eventually filed Chapter 11. By failing to do so,  “it’s like he [Geithner] burned billions of dollars again in government money, our money, gratuitously,” says Black.

Black believes the problem stems from regulators’ fears that if the banks recognize a loss on the bad assets it will create a domino effect that will wipe out the entire financial system.

“If that’s true we’ve got to get rid of capitalism,” he warns, “because if we can’t recognize losses in a capitalist system we have no future.”

A close look at the circumstances of the bank bailout of the past year, particularly the government’s decision to pay out AIG’s guarantees of other banks’ subprime derivative at 100 cents on the dollar, might reveal embezzlement on the grand scale. The AIG story has been all over the media, and suggests that then NY Fed chief Timothy Geithner paid AIG’s counterparties far more than he had to. A Google search on “AIG payout to Goldman Sachs” yields 104,000 hits. I haven’t seen all the evidence, but as a former derivatives trader and strategist for a credit-derivatives hedge fund, my professional judgment is that the case merits very close scrutiny by law enforcement.

Fat chance of that happening. At the Village Voice, Lieber’s story amounts to documentation of the rather alarming number of foxes entrusted with the henhouse of financial regulation. The firms who benefitted from the government bank bailout are amply represented in the ranks of the Obama administration, and his Treasury Secretary would be the prime suspect in a serious investigation of the AIG business.

I opposed bank nationalization at the beginning of this year (although it might have been done with little damage the previous September) because it was cheaper and easier to support the banks. But it is one thing to keep an institution afloat for economic reasons and another to let scoundrels and miscreants get away with theft.

It’s idiotic to believe that any framework for bank regulation will work unless existing laws against fraud are enforced.

Oh, did I mention that Geithner’s father was the Ford Foundation case officer paying for Obama’s mother’s field research in anthropology?

Lieber’s piece is entitled, “No Justice.” For once, I agree with the hard left: It’s time to ask why Obama won’t enforce the law of the land.

Escalating violence against Egyptian Coptic Christians coincides with a hardening of lines inside Egypt’s banned Muslim fundamentalist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas is officially the Gaza branch of the MB).

From a poster at this blog’s Forum:

Egypt (AINA) — Egyptian security forces have intensified their presence in the Upper Egyptian town of Dairout, in anticipation of a recurrence of Muslim violence against Christians. Copts expressed their fear over leaflets entitled “These have to Die!” which are being distributed to all Muslims in Dairout and neighborhoods, enticing them to “burn, vandalize and clean the country of these evil immoral infidels.”

Reports from Dairout, 313 km south of Cairo, confirm that Christian Copts are afraid to leave their homes and have stayed indoors since violence against them erupted on October 24, 2009. This collective punishment of Copts was caused by an illicit sexual relationship between a Muslim girl, Hagger Hassouna, and the Christian Romany Farouk Attallah. It was rumored that he sent videos of them intimately together to cell phones in Dairout before fleeing. This prompted the Hassouna family to kill his father, Farouk Attallah, on October 19, 2009, in revenge. Four of the Hassouna killers were detained by prosecution, leading to Muslim riots against the Copts (AINA 10-27-2009) .

According to Wagih Yacoub of the Middle East Christian Assosiation (MECA), Muslim-owned businesses are now displaying stickers with ‘Allah Akbar’ (Allah is Great) to differentiate between them and Coptic-owned businesses, as a form of pre-planning for a forthcoming wave of Muslim violence.

Handwritten leaflets (Arabic) have been circulated among Muslims in Dairout for the last two days; they call on Muslims to unite to take revenge for their religion and honor, claiming that Hagger Hassouna is innocent and that she was forced into vice, and “all Jews and Christians should come to learn that Muslim honor is precious.” The fliers state that Muslims are the masters of the world since beginning of times until the present day, and entices them to “burn and vandalize and clean the country of the evil immoral infidels.”

It also calls on Muslims to take revenge for the “rings of prostitution” which are the churches and in particular the church in the village of Ezbet Hanna. Those specifically named to be killed are Reverend Pavlos of the Church of the Virgin Mary, Coptic lawyer Gamal Youssef, two brothers who own an optometry practice, and a Copt who owns a beauty saloon and photography shop.

Muslims are asked to die for their honor and they will be rewarded with eternal paradise. “Do not say it is a matter of just a girl, no, it is a public and a serious issue, it is the biggest issue, it is Islam’s issue.” A transcript of the the leaflet (in Arabic) is published on Copts United website.

On Saturday, October, 31 the four Muslims accused of killing Farouk Attallah are expected appear in court again. A repeat of the Muslim mob violence which took place on October 24 is anticipated should prosecution extend their detainment once again.

Something deeper, and more ominous, appears to be at work here.

According to the English-language weekly edition of Al-Ahram, the leading Egyptian newspaper, a major shakeup inside the Muslim Brotherhood will harden ideological lines against Egypt’s Christian minority:

It would be no exaggeration to say that the resignation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s (MB) supreme guide (or more accurately his delegation of his responsibilities to his deputy) has ushered in the worst leadership crisis the Islamist organisation has experienced in over half a century.

Snip

The deeper effect of the crisis will be seen in greater organisational and ideological rigidity. The hardliners will probably engage in sweeping disciplinary measures, introduce stricter criteria for promotion, and continue their campaign to isolate and permanently sideline the reformist trend. The MB is thus on the threshold of another of its McCarthyist phases, such as that in 1996 targeting the sponsors of the Wasat Party, when a systematic campaign was launched to purge liberal-minded thinkers from the MB’s rank and file.

At an ideological level, the impending witch hunt may lead to a long-term setback for reformist ideas within the group, especially given the unfavourable external circumstances. This may not translate into major ideological U-turns on such central issues as the renunciation of violence; instead, there will be a greater shift to more fundamentalist ideas, made manifest in the MB’s official positions on such sensitive issues as the rights and status of women and Copts, as well as issues related to the arts, censorship, dress (the veil) and personal freedoms. This ideological direction will become clear after the conservatives and increasingly influential fundamentalists in the MB consolidate their alliance.

No more Mr. Nice Guy. Over at Asia Times Online this morning, I devoted my “Spengler” essay to the “idiot twins of American idealism.”

Former president George W Bush thought that the United States could turn Kabul into Peoria, the archetypal American city in the state of Illinois. President Barack Obama thinks that Kabul is just as good as Peoria. America has shed idealist delusion – that imposing the outward form of democracy in Iraq or Afghanistan would implant its content – in favor of an even stranger delusion, which refuses “to elevate one nation or group of people over another”, as Obama told the United Nations on September 23.

It was mad to believe that America could remake the world in its own image. Given that more than half the world’s languages will go extinct for lack of interest during the present century, it is even madder to turn foreign policy into an affirmative action program for disadvantaged cultures.

But those are the idiot twins of American idealism: either one size fits all, or size doesn’t matter.

Included amidst the one-liners are a few suggestions for a “realist” foreign policy.

I propose a neologism, “to stiggle,” meaning to make uneconomic loans for political reasons, in honor of Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz. If only we had nationalized the banks, he complains, we would have been able to force the banks to make uneconomic loans that they did not wish to take and that their borrowers did not wish to accept.

Apropos:

There was a professor named Stiglitz

Who said: “We need more room to wiggle. It’s

Fair for all pigs to eat.

We’ll just graft on a teat

So the sow can feed all of her piglets.”

Peggy Noonan asks why the clever young people in charge of the Obama administration fail to notice how much the rest of us are hurting:

When I see those in government, both locally and in Washington, spend and tax and come up each day with new ways to spend and tax—health care, cap and trade, etc.—I think: Why aren’t they worried about the impact of what they’re doing? Why do they think America is so strong it can take endless abuse?

I think I know part of the answer. It is that they’ve never seen things go dark. They came of age during the great abundance, circa 1980-2008 (or 1950-2008, take your pick), and they don’t have the habit of worry. They talk about their “concerns”—they’re big on that word. But they’re not really concerned. They think America is the goose that lays the golden egg. Why not? She laid it in their laps. She laid it in grandpa’s lap.

They don’t feel anxious, because they never had anything to be anxious about. They grew up in an America surrounded by phrases—”strongest nation in the world,” “indispensable nation,” “unipolar power,” “highest standard of living”—and are not bright enough, or serious enough, to imagine that they can damage that, hurt it, even fatally.

We are governed at all levels by America’s luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they’re not optimists—they’re unimaginative. They don’t have faith, they’ve just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don’t mind it when people become disheartened. They don’t even notice.

The sort of people who govern America are the investment-banking, private-equity, law-firm elite who have turned the financial system into an oligopoly dominated by a handful of players with an inside track from the federal government, either in the form of preferential financing or direct bailouts. I am not sure that the worthy Ms. Noonan has gotten it right. They seem less complacent to me than predatory. The entrepreneurial class–the outsiders, wannabees, local boosters, and promoters– has been wiped out in the present crisis as surely as Stalin killed off the kulaks. Bear Stearns was a Republican firm that specialized in mortgages because one didn’t need old-boy connections to get into that market. I worked there in its scrappiest days, and can report that it was the nastiest as well as the most honest place I passed through on Wall Street: its managers were convinced that no mercy would be shown them if anything went wrong, unlike their WASP competitors. Of course, they turned out to be correct.

The concentration of financial assets and financial power today is without precedent, and the last men standing after the bloodbath will make more money than ever.  “Callous” is the least of it.

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